History of Digital Marketing

Throughout the centuries there are key events that have shaped our definition of marketing and this unique form of communication between company and consumer.

Although not a new concept, marketing has evolved significantly since the start of the digital age. With the internet boom and the creation of different online mediums, digital marketing has either accompanies or has entirely replaced traditional, offline marketing.

Take a read through our interactive MintTwist Digital Timeline and discover more about these pivotal moments.

With the explosion of content marketing and access to create new and exciting platforms, the social media medium was born. Channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram presented new opportunities for brands to engage and entertain customers.

On March 11, 2000, technology shares began to fall as the dot-com bubble burst. The dot-com boom lasted only 3 years, from 1997 to 2000. Silicon Valley had a 17% declination in high-tech industries and lost 85,000 jobs.

Two software engineers, Reed Hastings and Marc Rudolph founded Netflix to rent movies on DVD. However, with the potential of streaming videos and TV shows, the service adopted a monthly subscription model: unlimited rentals for a single monthly rate.

In 1999 the underwear industry changed for good with the release of the Victoria’s Secret website. In the same year, Victoria’s Secret’s 30 second Super Bowl advertisement led to one million visits to the company’s website within an hour of airing.

You’ll never need to leave your couch again. Zappos.com, an online shoe and clothing shop based in Las Vegas, Nevada, was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn. Swinmurn’s initial inspiration came when he failed to find a pair of brown Airwalks at his local mall.

RSS is the first version of the web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works in Netscape. RSS feeds enable publishers to populate and publish information automatically. Additionally, RSS feeds provide users with to-the-minute updates from favoured websites.

The first of many Google metrics to be introduced is PageRank, an algorithm used by Google Search to prioritise websites in their search engine results. Named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, it works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is.

The Data Protection Act, the priority piece of legislation that governs the protection of personal data in the UK, is amended to provide a way for individuals to control searchable information about themselves.

Can you remember where you were when PPC came into existence? In February 1998, Jeffrey Brewer of Goto.com, a startup company, presented a concept that would evolve to become PPC advertising at the TED conference in California.

Who can forget Jeeves? In April 1997, Ask Jeeves was launched as a “natural language search engine.” It used human editors to try to match search queries and was powered by DirectHit, which aimed to rank results based on their popularity, but that technology proved to easy to spam. In 2006, Ask Jeeves was became Ask.

DoubleClick, an online ad-services providing agency provided online advertising, creating a way to track banner ad clicks and consumer behaviour so that return-on-investment (ROI) could be properly reported.

In 1995 Hotmail co-founders Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith pitched their idea of a free email service to the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurveston. The first praised the idea, but couldn’t fathom how this service would attract users and be profitable. However, HoTMaiL (with HTML in upper case letters) was launched to much fanfare. The unlimited storage was one of the main USPs.

Back in September 1995, Pierre Omidyar launched a site called ‘Auction Web,’ which evolved into the eBay we know and use today. From the beginning, Omidyar conceived of the site as a marketplace for the sale of goods and services.

Being an early and popular web search engine, AltaVista was the first to allow for natural language queries for its users. However, it declined in popularity due to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003.

Released in 1995, Internet Explorer was one of the most used web browsers, hitting an all time usage share of 95% during 2002 and 2003. On March 17, 2015, Microsoft released ‘Microsoft Edge,’ which replaced Internet Explorer.

Created by Randy Conrad, Classmates.com is a social media website that assists its members find, connect and keep in touch with friends and acquaintances from school life. In early 2008, Nielson Online ranked Classmates as no.3 in unique monthly visitors amongst social media channels.

In 1994, the first third party payment service for processing online credit cards was released. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) also became the first security technology to establish an encrypted link between a web server and browser. This link ensured that all data that was shared between the server and browser remained confidential.

Netscape Navigator is a discontinued proprietary web browser. In the 1990s, it was one of the most widely used web browsers. However, by 2002, web users had moved onto other browsers, such as Microsoft’s ‘Internet Explorer.’

In October 1994, the founders of Hotwired were brainstorming ways to pay their writers when they lit upon the idea of selling ad space in large quantities. Thus the term ‘banner advertising’ was coined. AT&T were one of the first companies to purchase ad space to promote themselves in the web magazine.

Yahoo! was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were Electrical Engineering graduate students. They created a website named “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. The Guide was a directory of other websites. In April 1994, Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed “Yahoo!”. The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.

In the 1990s, everything changed for marketers. With the popular rise in computer usage and, most significantly, the dot-com bubble, marketers shifted focus from traditional mediums like television, print media, and direct mailing to their online equivalents.

The original implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, then a postgraduate student at McGill University in Montreal, and Bill Heelan, who studied at Concordia University in Montreal and worked at McGill University at the same time. It is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing people to find specific files. Due to limited space, only the listings were available and not the contents for each site.

On 20 December, 1990 Tim Berners-Lee launched the first website, which was hosted on his NeXT computer. It described the basic features of the web; how to access other people’s documents and how to set up your own server.

In 1989 Peapod, based in the US, launched the first online grocery store. Two brothers, Thomas and Andrew Parkinson, were developing a new way to shop. With DOS programming software, dial-up modems and floppy disks, they created Peapod.com, and shopping from a computer for home-delivered goods was born.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW). It was originally developed for meeting the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutions around the world.

Windows 2.0 is a 16-bit Microsoft Windows GUI-based operating environment that was released on December 9, 1987. Compared to Windows 1.0, Windows 2.0 allowed application windows to overlap each other and had more sophisticated keyboard-shortcuts.

The Linus Write-Top, released in 1987, allowed users to write directly on the screen with the included stylus. It is not a touch screen but a touch screen in which a voltage is applied to the screen edges, and a stylus detects the voltage at the touched location.

Released on November 20, 1985 as the first version of the Microsoft Windows line, the Windows 1.0 is a personal computer. Its development was spearheaded by the company founder, Bill Gates, after seeing a demo of a similar software suite known as Visi On at COMDEX.

Being the first online community, the WELL (Whole Earth “Lectronic Link) started with a dialogue between the fiercely independent writers and readers of the Whole Earth Review. This set the tone for the intellectual and social gathering that continues to this day.

Directed by Ridley Scott, Apple introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer in a commercial that’s only national airing was during the third quarter of the Superbowl XVIII. English athlete Anya Major performed as the unnamed heroine. She represented the coming of the Macintosh as a means of saving humanity from “conformity”. The theme of the commercial was an allusion to George Orwell’s noted novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Minitel was a Videotex online service accessible through telephone lines. It is considered one of the world’s most successful pre-World Wide Web online services. The service was first rolled out in Britanny and then throughout France.

The first IBM personal computer, formally known as the IBM Model 5150, used Microsoft´s MS-DOS operating system. The IBM PC revolutionised business computing by becoming the first PC to gain widespread adoption by industry.

MicroSoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS, was an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems and was the main operating system for IBM compatible personal computers during the 1980s and the early 1990s.

Michael Aldrich, an English inventor and entrepreneur, invented online shopping, known originally as teleshopping. Aldrich’s system connected a modified TV to a real-time processing computer via a domestic telephone line. It enabled online transaction processing between consumers and businesses, or between one business and another, a technique that evolved into eCommerce.

In 1978, Gary Thuerk sent an email promoting DEC machines to 400 users via ARPANET. It resulted in $13 million worth of sales for DEC machines (and a few complaints!). From the start, email launched itself as an effective channel for direct marketing.

While working on ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, Raymond Tomlinson invented email. Initially messages could only be sent and read on the same computer. It is believed the first email message Tomlinson sent was the top row of keys on the keyboard – QWERTYUIOP.

The original specification for the FTP, ‘File Transfer Protocol,’ was written by Abhay Bhushan and published on 16 April, 1971. It, as a standard network protocol, helps to transfer computer files between a client and server on a computer network.

In 1970, eCommerce was invented. The magic behind this is ‘Electronic Data Interchange’ (EDI), an electronic communication method that provides standards for exchanging data via any electronic means. This allows companies to carry out electronic transactions.

On 1st October 1969, the first ‘Advanced Research Projects Agency Network,’ the precursor to today’s internet, communications was sent between Kleinrock’s lab at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) under the direction of Elizabeth Feinler. It was an early packet switching network and become the foundation of the Internet.

Television advertising in Britain began on 22nd September, 1955. The first commercial was for Gibbs SR toothpaste. It featured a tube of toothpaste, a block of ice and a commentary about the product’s “tingling fresh” qualities.

The first recorded use of the term ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ was by John Audettes. The meaning of SEO has evolved and changed over the years to now refer to webmaster-provided information like meta data, keyword density, technical SEO and other on-page factors.

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